Multiple simultaneous wireless 720p streams?

First time XBMC user, and on my way to setting up a NAS solution for our home using Synology NAS and a 3 TB HDD, with XBMC installed on each AppleTV (black).

I have not purchased those devices yet, want to make sure I get it right.

The preliminary tests seems to be passing so far. I'm able to stream & watch 720p vids wirelessly from an old PC with SMB share, to XBMC installed on my MacBook Pro with no stuttering issues.

I think it is reasonable to assume that I should have no issue running 720p streams once I replace my old PC with the NAS solution and using XBMC-enabled ATV's (black).

But what about streaming 2 vids (which can happen pretty much at our home), or even 3 vids (rare occasions)? What should I expect in general with the aforementioned setup? Should I expect stuttering with 2 or 3 720p streams?

I tried testing this by playing a XBMC 720p video and also a Netflix streamed movie at the same time to my wireless MacBook Pro, but I'm not sure if this is a good test to tell me whether or not I'd have problems with running two 720p XBMC vids at same time.

If there is going to be a problem, should I choose differently when purchasing the devices?

I would first suggest you move away from SMB and over to NFS if your NAS supports and you can get it setup, 3 stream should be do-able. I have tested it once or twice 2 steams should be possible for sure.

I forgot I had my work MacBook Pro home, so I did a two-720p-stream test using just SMB.. and other than one of the movies being paused to buffer once, it has no issue playing both 720p streams at the same time so I find that pretty encouraging since it's only using SMB and not a dedicated NAS solution.

Once you get your NAS, you may wish to test out each protocol using a few test files before building your library based on one. Strangely for me, NFS was slower, but I never did dig into it at the time, as smb was fine for me.

It's the effort involved in scanning and then rescanning your library. If you switch the protocol of your source, you have to clean out your library first. I think it would also leave the thumbnails from the first scan orphaned, as I don't believe the clean removes unused thumbnails.